Equilibrium Point

Pride cometh before a fall

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:00:15 GMT

Yesterday I had my first high speed unicycle crash on my new geared unicycle. I haven't had a serious crash for a few years now. The good news is thanks to some excellent gloves/wrist guards I escaped relatively unscathed (my last big crash required a trip to A&E plus frequent trips to the doctor for weeks afterwards). Read on for the gritty details.

I've been breaking in my new geared unicycle for a while now. It has the capability to go faster than my previous uni but it is also harder to stay balanced, especially when changing gears. I find that the extra speed shaves off about 5 minutes on my trip to university. I've also been pleasantly surprised on a few recent commutes to have been able to keep up with some of the two wheelers on the road. They'll often lose me on the downhills but I can sometimes match them on the flat and usually make up ground on the up hills.

Yesterday I pulled up to the lights as I friend on two wheels drew level with me. We had a chat and then he shot off fast as he was late for an appointment. Being the competitive type I thought to myself "I wonder if I can pull him in on the next hill?" I started cranking after him but just missed getting through the next set of lights because they turned red, so he extended his lead. The lights changed and I really started pumping the legs in an effort to catch up, accelerating past the 30 km an hour mark.

Just at that point I must have hit a small bump and several things happened extremely fast. I lost my balance and a fraction of a second later I knew I was going to hit the ground and hit it hard. At 30 km/h it is impossible to run out of a dismount. I focused on trying to stay on for as long as possible in a vain hope of being able to bring the unicycle back under control. At the same time I realized that due to traffic whizzing past on the right and parked vehicles on the left it was critical I held to a straight line until there was a space to veer left. As I fell my foot hit the ground with such force that my shoe was ripped off (impressive as it has both laces and velcro!) I managed to get my hands out in front of me and absorbed some of the force on my most excellent padded gloves, while starting to roll. I rolled onto my back as I skidded along the road, which reduced the amount of skin being grated off and took me away from traffic. Fortunately my unicycle didn't bounce into the path of oncoming cars. I must have slid a fair way as my shoe was left a good 10 metres back.

Rolling is a key skill to walking away from a highspeed crash and I was very happy I'd managed to pull off a decent roll. I was still very shaken as I took stock of injuries: bruised heel, skinned knee, skinned elbow and road burn on my hip (painfull but all very minor injuries). I was exceedingly glad I'd left my laptop at work as usually I carry it home in my backpack and in this accident it would have likely been toast. My only loss was one sock due to a gaping hole being ripped open. The sweaty gloves I've been wearing since the last accident finally earnt their keep, with nary a scratch to my hands.

I was back riding to work today, albeit a little slower and with no plans of trying to overtake two wheelers anytime soon.

Breadmaker revival

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:54:57 GMT

We've recently brought out the breadmaker from storage and started using it again. Making your own bread is cheaper, more fun and results in lovely smells as well. I find I go through seasons of using a breadmaker and it is always an enjoyable experience. My lovely wife has some very yummy dough recipes, so she has been making the dough, which we then shape and finish off in the oven.

My current favourite is gourmet pizza bread. Once the dough is ready I put a little oil on a tray and use my hands to spread the dough out into a roughly circular shape. To get a bit of "focaccia feel" I also use my thumbs to make little indentations and then spread a bit more oil on the top. I season the top with crushed garlic, salt, pepper and fresh rosmary. Finally add some grated cheese and bake for about 15 minutes. Delicious!

If you are interested the dough ingredients are:
2 tsp sugar
1 cup warm milk
1 cup warm water
1.5 Tbsp dried yeast
4 cups plain flour
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp oil

Follow your breadmaker instructions on what order to add the dry and wet ingredients

The perfect omelette

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 22:25:59 GMT

Saturday brunch is one of my favourite meals of the week. I'm quite picky about what constitutes the perfect "big breakfast" so more often than not I'll cook brunch myself, rather than risk being disappointed at a cafe. My eggs benny with all the sides is now down to a fine art, but until recently my sporadic omelette attempts have been rather disheartening.

This all changed last week with our visit to the food show. The Omelette Guy was presenting, dressed from top to toe in bright yellow,and he was producing astoundingly good omelettes in less than a minute. It was incredible how quickly he could make something that tasted so fantastic and the really encouraging thing was it didn't look that tricky either. I watched for a few minutes and learnt how to make the 40 second omelette.

I thorougly recommend his very simple technique. Here's the link to his recipe book, which is available to download:
http://www.eggs.org.nz/downloads/Recipe_Book_high.pdf

Two eggs, two tablespoons of water, seasonings, a few fillings and a few minutes results in a delicious meal.

Waiting on the weather

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 06:52:29 GMT

Unfortunately yesterday's commute home did not go quite so well. Less than half way home I pulled up to some lights and heard a loud crack. I suspected a broken spoke but it turned out my unicycle frame had snapped in half. This left me with a long walk home in the dark and cold, wearing nothing but a t-shirt (as I usually rely on cycling to keep warm). Fortunately my sister came and rescued me about two thirds of the way home.

Usually I would be quite disheartened that my main mode of transport was no longer usable. This week it wasn't quite so bad though as my dream unicycle is now finally assembled! Much to my surprise the last part arrived on Thursday, earlier than anticipated. (Hooray for express courier from Australia). I spent this afternoon putting everything together and am very happy with the end result. Unfortunately I have yet to take it for a spin due to the "once in a decade" tropical cyclone outside. Hurricane force winds and unicycling are not a great mix, although I have been sorely tempted several times today to disregard the civil defence warnings and head outside anyway.

I will not bore everyone with the technical specifications of my new uni. Suffice to say every part is top of the line: the hub alone is worth more than 10 normal unicycles. Here is a picture of my new wheel.

The art of cheese

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:11:25 GMT

Woohoo! I finally got a few days off of work, after a long hard slog. I decided to celebrate by extending my culinary skills to include cheese making. I enjoy cooking but these days I don't have huge amounts of time to devote to it, so my cheese making aspirations have had to wait until I had a bit more time up my sleeve. Inspired by a friend, I embarked on my first attempt at mozarella and ricotta.

I was pleasantly surprised at how simple the process was. You only need three ingredients (full cream milk, citric acid and rennet) plus some patience. This Mozarella recipe is easy to follow and it turns out cheese making is a lot of fun. It is a lovely feeling squishing out the whey from the curds and very satisfying to see the cheese gradually taking shape. Just making mozarella by itself is not incredibly economical, as 2 litres of milk only gave me 250 grams of mozarella. However, you can use the leftover whey to make ricotta so that it works out costing approximately $10 per kg for speciality cheese which is very reasonable.

I've tried using my mozarella in a few dishes and it does indeed have that lovely stringy quality when used on pizza. The taste is very mild and a little creamier than supermarket mozarella. I went easy on the salt but may try using a little more next time. Cheese making will probably remain a holiday activity but I'm glad I had a chance to try creating something .

High tech unicycle, the long wait is nearly over!

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:45:24 GMT

Tonight I finally held in my hands the pinnacle of unicycling technology, my new Schlumpf Kris Holm mountain unicycle hub. I first discovered a prototype existed over two and a half years ago and have had designs on one ever since. It is been a long wait but it should only be another week or so before I have it built up into a unicycle.

What is so special about a Schlumpf muni hub? It is a precision Swiss engineered unicycle hub built using the ISIS spline standard. It is designed to withstand big drops AND it has two gears. Each one is individually numbered and mine is number 86 (so I will be dubbing it the Get Smart hub). Did I mention is has TWO gears!

Two gears mightn't sound like much to a bicyclist but it is extremely difficult to design a unicycle hub that can actually allow gear changes while riding. The Schlumpf hub is based on a clever system called a planetary gear design and it can be changed via gold and silver buttons on the axle, which you click using your heel as you pedal.

After waiting what seems an age I will soon be in possession of THE most advanced unicycle in New Zealand. This is the unicyclist's equivalent of owning a lamborghini.

The pleasure of listening to music on a decent set of headphones

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:41:19 GMT

I am not an audiophile, although I am a bit of a gadget freak. When it came to buying a set of headphones for my ipod I wasn't at all sure what to get. I am fairly rigorous about researching my purchases though and also believe it is a good idea to ask an expert. On all things audio my brother is a good source of info, as he IS an audiophile and has even worked for a company that manufactures high quality headphones. My brother suggested a few respected audio brands such as Bose and Sennheiser which helped me narrow my search.

On of my first steps in deciding what to buy is to determine what the primary uses of the item will be. I see little point in basing a purchase choice on features I will use only rarely. In this case I wanted a set of headphones that I could listen to podcasts and music on while unicycling to and from work. I also wanted headphones I could listen to for extended periods of time while working at university. These two target uses resulted in me drawing up the following list of requirements that needed to be met:

must be able to be worn with a cycle helmet
must not block out exterior sound (otherwise they would be unsafe to use when riding in traffic)
must be fairly robust (they are likely to be thrown around a fair bit)
must be comfortable enough to wear for extended periods of time

Money was not as much of a consideration as usual since I recently had one of those "milestone" birthdays and my parents had kindly given me some cash to spend on headphones. This meant I could spend a little more to get a really nice set of headphones. I figured that it was worth spending a bit extra for quality when I could easily be using these headphones six to eight hours a day.

After the requisite hours trolling headphone reviews I decided something from the Sennheiser PMX range would be appropriate. I dislike in ear headphones, plus they block out too much exterior sound, so that eliminated the PMX 70s. It seemed silly to shell out for absolute top of the line headphones when much of my listening would be in environments with ambient noise, so that eliminated the PMX 200s. This narrowed things to either PMX 40s, PMX 60s or PMX 100s.

The PMX 40s got extremely bad reviews on comfort so they quickly popped off the list. The PMX 60s received extremely good reviews all round, with people ranking them as a more comfortable fit than the PMX 100s. The only down side to them seemed to be audio leakage but that wasn't going to be an issue in my work environment (it is noisy enough people wouldn't notice a tiny bit of noise coming from headphones). The PMX 100s apparently sound better but they looked a little flimsier and didn't rank so well on the comfort scale.

In the end I went for the PMX 60s, shown below and am extremely happy with them.
They are very robust (I've dropped them a fair few times and the cord gets accidentally yanked several times a week). They are extremely comfortable and I have no problems wearing them for an hour or two at a time. They also fit nicely when wearing a helmet and I love the fact they the have a cord on only one side as this makes for far fewer tangles. The sound quality is very good, even though they are only on ear phones. The higher frequencies are nice and crisp, although the bass is a little lacking. They don't block out too much noise either, so cycling in traffic is ok as long as you don't crank up the volume. I was surprised to find I could hold conversations and hear quite subtle noises (birdsong etc) while listening to music.

Are they worth paying 2 to 3 times more than a brand like sony would cost? I think so. I'm using them around 30 to 40 hours a week and after six weeks listening to them think they are worth every penny. I would be surprised if you could find a more comfortable pair of headphones.

Resurrecting my Parker Pen

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:12:56 GMT

I like nice pens. It seems a little silly to buy a $20 Parker ballpoint when a $1 bic will do the same job but I derive a large amount of enjoyment from using a nice pen. $20 is a lot to pay for a pen but I console myself with the thought that at least I don't have a fascination for nice cars. I view a car is something to get you from point A to point B. If it works I'm happy and I don't mind if it looks like a piece of junk (mine certainly does!). I'm never going to go out and spend tens of thousands on a car, because a few thousand will get me a functional car which does what I want. A pen on the other hand is about more than function, it is my chance at owning a little bit of style without breaking the bank. I know it is extravagent but for the amount of pleasure I get from owning a nice pen, I feel like I am getting good value for money. I don't go in for fountain pens because I rarely use them but I figure a good ball point gets used just about every day so it is ok to splurge a bit. I carry them around in my "man bag" or my pocket.

When I finished high school I got a nice parker pen. When I got married I got a nice parker pen. I've recently had one of those big milestone birthdays so it is probably time for yet another parker pen (or maybe I will break out and buy a different brand).

My pens are used everyday which unfortunately means sometimes I lose one (with much sadness). More recently I accidently sent one through the washing machine, rendering it non-functional. I could have given up on the pen but there are happy memories associated with using it so I didn't want to just chuck it away. Instead I decided to see if I could resurrect it. I'm sure this is related to my compulsion as an Engineer to fix things.

It turned out that with a fair amount of time and effort it was possible to resurrect my now very leaky Parker, although I had to turn to my friend atomsmith for some chemistry advice on how to remove inkstains from metal. He suggested that meths would be a good solvent to use. After removing the leaky ink cartridge I put my Parker through several meths baths, followed by water rinses until finally the clicking mechanism was ungummed and working again. (The meths baths went a lovely shade of deep purple). I then had to remove the tiny spring/plastic insert from the front barrel and round out the hole in the plastic insert which had become ovalised. After inserting a new ink cartridge I had a working Parker which looked none the worse for wear! I'm a very happy camper.

The perils of being an "Engineer"

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:22:58 GMT

I am an Engineer in the very real sense that I have a piece of paper that says I have a degree in Engineering. Unfortunately sometimes what you want is an Engineer in the sense that the washing machine is broken and needs fixing. Because I think of myself as an Engineer, I feel that I should have mastery over all things mechanical and electrical. As you may have guessed, this is far from the truth. Give me an advanced mathematical problem and I can bust you some plots but when my car breaks down I usually end up reaching for the phone and ringing a mechanic.

The problem is I feel that calling in an expert for an "Engineering" problem is a bit of a cop out. When confronted with a mechanical problem feelings of inadequacy begin to well up. I feel like I should know how to fix my car, the washing machine, the garage door, the insinkerator and anything else around they house that may have broken down. I am after all, an Engineer!

Of course I could leave mechanical problems to the experts but sometimes I just can't resist and throw myself into trying to diagnose the problem and fix it. Every so often things go swimmingly and I actually manage to fix something but there are the times when things don't go so well, like my last attempt to fix the washing machine. I figured it was a blocked pump and how hard could it be to fix? All I needed to do was tip the machine over a bit to access the bottom, detach the pump and clear it out. Sounds simple right? Three hours and one very flooded washroom later I was ready to admit defeat. Fortunately my father in law turned up that weekend and showed me how to finish the job off. It would have been far more efficient to call in a repairman but that would have been admitting the "Engineer" couldn't fix it. (That reminds me, I should probably write a blog entry on how to fix a blocked F&P washing machine pump, as it saves a $100 call out fee).

Armed with a manual I can usually nut things out although it isn't always the most efficient way to get things done and I have discovered that many manuals miss out vital pieces of information. Regardless I will continue my crusade to become a "real Engineer". I managed to reprogram the garage doors and get them working again but the insinkerator remains inoperable. I am still fairly clueless when it comes to cars, although my car breaks down so often that I am gradually learning more about the anatomy of an engine through all the parts that have been replaced. Once every possible part has failed, I'll have a pretty good idea on how to diagnose problems :-)

Just how far can you push your body?

Fri, 30 May 2008 13:39:09 GMT

This week was one of those crazy weeks when there simply wasn't enough time in a day to get everything done. Chief on the list of urgent tasks was finishing off a couple of exams and tests. Writing exams is way more stressful than actually taking them. If you screw up sitting an exam one person suffers (yourself!). If I screw up writing an exam 600 students suffer.

This was the week where I discovered that you can still deliver coherent mathematics lectures after only four hours sleep. Unfortunately working until 2am hadn't polished off all the urgent tasks so I followed my four hours sleep with an eighteen hour working day. Burning the candle at both ends was a bad idea because it meant only 2.5 hours sleep before unicycling back to work for more lecturing and a twelve hour working day.

What surprised me was just how chipper I was feeling on my unicycle into work. After very little sleep and large amounts of work you would expect your body to be very unco-operative. Instead I enjoyed a very speedy ride in, feeling invigorated.

It got my wondering just how far can you push your body and remain functional? From past experience I know that there are limits but it never ceases to surprise me just how far you can push yourself before you reach those limits. It seems that you have the will to continue, your body will provide the ability to do so, albeit with groans and protests.

There is an excellent book called Ultramarathon man which follows the life story of Dean Karnazes . His experiences are a testimony to just how far you can push yourself if you really try. The limits of human endurance are truly astounding. I found it an interesting read as I've done my share of ultra distance events (on one wheel). I wonder whether such accomplishments as running 200 miles are only possible for a select few or if anyone could achieve the things Dean does, if only they had the will power? Perhaps such things are possible for only a few, because only a few possess the will power required

The joy of delayed gratification

Mon, 19 May 2008 21:51:43 GMT

After six months of saving, I recently purchased my first ipod (A third generation eight gig nano). I have been thoroughly enjoying it, more so because of the wonderful principle of delayed gratification. It took me a long time to save up because:
1) My disposable income has dropped with the addition of a beautiful daughter to our little family
2) I like eating out and enjoying the odd coffee
3) I buy the odd present for friends and family (birthday, christmas, etc)

When you combine these factors, saving up the $300 necessary becomes an epic journey. I have been slowly colouring in my ipod-o-mometer (thanks Mike!) and watching the level on the graph climb towards the $300 mark.

What intrigued me most about the process was that I got far more enjoyment out of my purchase than if I had just gone out one weekend and laid down the cash. Six months of saving also meant six months of anticipation. It gave me plenty of time to think about whether I really wanted one or if it was just a fleeting desire. It gave me six months to consider exactly what model I wanted and what accessories I would then work towards. I love analysing things and initially I thought that six months focused on one purchase would be a little boring. Not so! I found that it was just as much fun buying one big thing as it would have been buying lots of smaller things, or indeed lots of bigger things. This was a lovely realisation to come to as I always have some planned purchase in the pipeline and now I know I needn't rush through my purchases.

It is a happy realisation that I can slow down my expendature, while still deriving pleasure from "retail therapy". For me, half the fun is in the anticipation and planning stage, so it doesn't matter if that stage is stretched out a lot.

In case you are wondering, my next planned acquisition is a geared unicycle but more on that later.

My ramblings begin...

Sun, 18 May 2008 10:01:12 GMT

Welcome to my blog. I've held off blogging for a while now, as it seems odd to share personal details in the public arena. With the progression of time however, I am using the internet more and more to research my purchases and decisions. Sometimes I find blog posts very helpful in making up my mind on what to buy or how to do something, so I've decided to add my 2c worth into the pot.

I have a large amount of work on my plate for the next couple of months so posts are likely to be very sporadic. I've got plenty to say about my favourite gadgets and tech stuff, so keep an eye on this blog if you are interested in the musings of a mathematically oriented engineer who spends a lot of time on one wheel.